Programming Sucks

It does, and yet I wouldn't want to do anything else. [Link]

All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people

Imagine joining an engineering team. You're excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he's involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don't worry, says Mary, Fred's going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they're going to add to the bridge's appeal. Of course, they'll have to be built without railings, because there's a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who's not an engineer. Nobody's sure what Phil does, but it's definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you'll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it's become a case of "whoever got to that part of the design first." This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they've given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they're still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody's pretty sure they're important parts. After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don't have any because you're a propulsion engineer and don't know anything about bridges.

Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn't.

The road to madness.

We didn't start out crazy, we're being driven crazy

ERROR: Attempted to parse HTML with regular expression; system returned Cthulhu.

Funny, right? No? How about this exchange:

"Is that called arrayReverse?"

"s/camel/_/"

"Cool thanks."

Wasn't that guy helpful? With the camel? Doesn't that seem like an appropriate response? No? Good. You can still find Jesus. You have not yet spent so much of your life reading code that you begin to talk in it. The human brain isn't particularly good at basic logic and now there's a whole career in doing nothing but really, really complex logic. Vast chains of abstract conditions and requirements have to be picked through to discover things like missing commas. Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon. You immerse yourself in a world of total meaninglessness where all that matters is a little series of numbers went into a giant labyrinth of symbols and a different series of numbers or a picture of a kitten came out the other end.

The destructive impact on the brain is demonstrated by the programming languages people write. This is a program:

#include 

int main( int argc, char** argv ) {
    std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

That program does exactly the same thing as this program:

`r```````````.H.e.l.l.o. .w.o.r.l.di

And this program:

>+++++++++[<++++++++>-]<.>+++++++[<++++>-]<+.+++++++..+++.[-]
>++++++++[<++++>-] <.>+++++++++++[<++++++++>-]<- .--------.="" .------.--------.="">++++++++[<++++>- ]<+.[-]++++++++++.

And this one:

Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook.
Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook?
Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook.
Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook.
Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook.
Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook!
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.

And once somebody wrote a programming language that let somebody else write this:

#:: ::-| ::-| .-. :||-:: 0-| .-| ::||-| .:|-. :||
open(Q,$0);while(){if(/^#(.*)$/){for(split('-',$1)){$q=0;for(split){s/|
/:.:/xg;s/:/../g;$Q=$_?length:$_;$q+=$q?$Q:$Q*20;}print chr($q);}}}print"n";
#.: ::||-| .||-| :|||-| ::||-| ||-:: :|||-| .:|

According to the author, that program is "two lines of code that parse two lines of embedded comments in the code to read the Mayan numbers representing the individual ASCII characters that make up the magazine title, rendered in 90-degree rotated ASCII art."

That program won a contest, because of course it did. Do you want to live in a world like this? No. This is a world of where you can smoke a pack a day and nobody even questions it. "Of course he smokes a pack a day, who wouldn't?" Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.

South Pacific island found not to exist

Really. R'lyeh. The Call of Cthulhu. [Link]

The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.

But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.

The phantom island has featured in publications for at least a decade.

Scientist Maria Seton, who was on the ship, said that the team was expecting land, not 1,400m (4,620ft) of deep ocean.

"We wanted to check it out because the navigation charts on board the ship showed a water depth of 1,400m in that area - very deep," Dr Seton, from the University of Sydney, told the AFP news agency after the 25-day voyage.

"It's on Google Earth and other maps so we went to check and there was no island. We're really puzzled. It's quite bizarre.

Australian newspapers have reported that the invisible island would sit within French territorial waters if it existed - but does not feature on French government maps. "How did it find its way onto the maps? We just don't know, but we plan to follow up and find out."

Australia's Hydrographic Service, which produces the country's nautical charts, says its appearance on some scientific maps and Google Earth could just be the result of human error, repeated down the years.

A spokesman from the service told Australian newspapers that while some map makers intentionally include phantom streets to prevent copyright infringements, that was was not usually the case with nautical charts because it would reduce confidence in them.

A spokesman for Google said they consult a variety of authoritative sources when making their maps.

"The world is a constantly changing place, the Google spokesman told AFP, "and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour'.'

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy in Sydney says that while most explorers dream of discovering uncharted territory, the Australian team appears to have done the opposite - and cartographers everywhere are now rushing to undiscover Sandy Island for ever.

101 images of Cthulhu

Squamous. [Link]

It's well known that the great Cthulhu has a particular bond with artists of all sorts. In H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" it's documented thusly:

"It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came ... a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last."

Even today hundreds of artists are moved by Cthulhu's dreams that emanate from the corpse city of R'Lyeh where he slumbers. Here are 100 of the works these febrile minds have produced in recent years,  plus Lovecraft's original drawing of the great elder god, making it an uneven 101. Enjoy!

Great Cthulhu will not be pleased

Sacrificial offering Science to be made in orbit. [Link]

It's a momentous occasion for cephalopods everywhere as the first ever squid in space is now, uh, in space. The celebration will be short lived, however, as NASA plans to have the astronauts about Endeavour kill the squid in just a matter of hours, before it can break out of its tube of seawater and turn the battle lasers of the ISS on us. Or something.
The reason that a baby bobtail squid is going along for Endeavour's final flight in the first place is not to study whether squid turn into superhuman monster brain sucking aliens when exposed to cosmic rays and a low gravity environment, but rather to watch and see whether a certain type of bacteria inside the squid plays naughty or nice in orbit. Previous studies of harmful bacteria in space suggest that zero gee can make the bad bugs up to three times nastier, so the question is, what happens to thegood bugs?

It's not a tumor

It isn't. It's a worm. [Link]

Rosemary Alvarez started experiencing numbness in her arm and blurred vision. She went to the emergency room twice and had acat scan, but everything came up clear, MyFOXPhoenix.com reported.

Click here for a video.

It wasn’t until doctors took a closer look at an MRI that they discovered something very disturbing.

“Once we saw the MRI we realized this is something not good,” neurosurgeon, Dr. Peter Nakaji told the news station. “It's something down in her brain stem which is as deep in the brain as you can be.”

Alvarez was wheeled into surgery where Nakaji and his colleagues were expecting to remove a tumor, but they uncovered a worm instead.

On a video of the surgery, Nakaji can be heard chuckling after he made the discovery.

“I'm sure this is a very strange response for the people in the operating room,” he told MyFOXPhoenix.com. “But because I was so pleased to know that it wasn't going to be something terrible.”

My head is itching just thinking about it.

No, please no

Ron Howard is having H.P. Lovecraft fight monsters, bringing The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft to the screen. Please no. Take 1d6 SAN loss. [Link]

Mega-producer Ron Howard sounds like he's realizing just how important the father of all eldritch awesomeness H.P. Lovecraft really is. But we're still suspicious of this Van Helsing-crossed-with-Shakespeare In Love film, in which Lovecraft unleashes and fights monsters.
Ron Howard revealed the first tiny details of his film to the LA Times. Howard called the whole project "challenging as it's the first time he's translated a graphic novel.

Ron Howard just doesn't seem like the right guy for this.

Casting Call of Cthulhu

Funny film. [Link]

For the well dressed Man in Black on the hunt

Handheld burner. [Link]

Easy to carry from place to place, a weed burner solves the problem of clearing land. It throws a fan-shaped flame that mushrooms against the ground, stone wall or rock pile to “melt” every growing plant within its range. One model of the burner is self-contained for one-man operation. It has a tank that holds oil for one and one-half hours” work. The handle is constructed for attachment of a shoulder strap or webbing to facilitate carrying. Thetorch also can be used for sterilizing poultry houses, dog kennels and stables.

Right, dog kennels and stables. Not shambling zombies or rampaging triffids. Good cover story.

The Call of Cthulhu Movie Trailer

Fan made silent film.

I HAVE to see this movie

I have no choice. [Link]

Richardson is producing "My Name Is Bruce," a forthcoming horror-comedy in which a sleazy actor named "Bruce Campbell" is kidnapped by small-town yokels in the fictional town of Gold Lick, Oregon; they believe the thespian really is the zombie-slaying hero of the "Evil Dead" series, and want him to battle a real-life Chinese demon. Campbell co-wrote, directed and stars in the movie, and shot much of it on his property in Jacksonville, Oregon.

The script practically writes itself.

Two Great Tastes...

That taste great together: LOLCats and Cthulhu.